Internationally renowned colleagues from the fields of infection research, immunology or hygiene are honored as DGHM lecturers.
This year Prof. Gordon Brown (University of Exeter Medical School, Exeter, UK) was honored as DGHM Lecturer 2024 for his outstanding work on the role of C-type lectins and other pattern recognition receptors in immunity and his international leadership in the field of fungal immunology.
Title of the DGHM Lecture 2024
C-type lectins – key regulators of anti-fungal immunity
Prof. Gordon Brown (left), Conference Chair Oliver Kurzai, DGHM President Jan Buer (right)
Gordon Brown is Professor and Director of the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, he returned to Cape Town to establish his independent laboratory. He then took up a Chair at the University of Aberdeen in 2009 in the famous Aberdeen Fungal Group and finally moved to the University of Exeter in 2019.
Gordon’s research focusses on understanding the role of innate immune receptors. He discovered C-type lectins as a novel class of pattern recognition receptors and since this discovery has continuously contributed to our understanding of these receptors. One major role of C-type lectins is the recognition of fungal pathogens and thus Gordon’s research has had a major impact in medical mycology and our understanding of anti-fungal immunity.
Importantly Gordon has also developed a strong interest in fungal pathogens and it is his global impact in the field of Medical Mycology that I want to specifically emphasize in the context of this award: He has advanced the study of fungal infections in HIV patients in Africa, he is one of the co-founders of the Gordon Research Conference on Fungal Immunology- one of the key meetings in the field and has triggered the Mycotalks online seminar series that each month brings together several hundred colleagues from all over the world. He has been a keynote speaker at the DGHM before and has been acting as an international reviewer on behalf of the DFG several times.